Hey my dudes!
Sometimes developing a recipe is easy. I have an idea, I make it, it’s great, I declare it to be have. “Have” is quintessential kitchen speak.
“How are you doing on lemons for service?”
“Have!”
“We need a vanilla ice cream recipe that’s also dairy-free.”
“Have!”
“Have” means that you’ve got it. You have it. It is have. In the context of recipe creation Axel (my fiance and Bageriet Lördag’s Head of Recipe Development) and I often talk about whether a recipe is “have” or not. Have means it’s finished, it’s good to go. We can make it for the bakery, I can publish the recipe.
For those who are new here Bageriet Lördag is my one-day-a-week pop-up bakery that I run from my apartment. You can find info about here:
Sometimes it takes a long time for a recipe to be made. This was one of those times.
The original idea was for a punschrulle* scone. You can think of punschrulle kinda like a Swedish cake pop. It’s usually made of leftover cake scraps, some butter, some chocolate and then it’s flavored with punsch which is a type of liquor that is very popular here in Sweden. The dough, I guess you could call it, is encased in green marzipan, cut into pieces and the ends are dipped into dark chocolate.
*Punschrullar are often called dammsugare, “vacuum cleaners”, because of their resemblance to old school vacuum cleaners and because they use leftover crumbs.
I imagined a scone with the same flavors; chocolate, marzipan and punsch. Sounds delicious right? So Axel began to work on the recipe. Making a chocolate scone was easy. He replaced 10% of the flour with cocoa and it was good to go. For the marzipan we would simply add chunks of almond paste into the dough. It took a couple trials to figure out how much almond paste to add and how big the chunks should be, but it wasn’t too hard.
But then there was the punsch of it all.
The cream in a scone gives it both fat and hydration both of which are important for achieving the correct texture. Replace cream with punsch and the texture won’t be right. Add too much punsch in addition to the cream and you’ll get a soggy mess by the time the scone actually tastes like punsch. And this was important because the flavor of punsch in a dammsugare is very prominent.
We decided to add the punsch flavor into the glaze and this ended up being the most difficult part. Should we color the glaze green like how a punschrulle would be green? But would that look appetizing or be weird? Axel’s solution was to switch it from a punschrulle scone to an arraksboll scone.
Arraksbollar (arrak balls) are very similar to punschrullar. It’s the same kind of “dough”, leftover cake scraps mixed together with butter and cocoa. Instead of punsch, arrak essence is used which is a bit confusing because punsch is made of arrak. But arrak, the liquor, is not common in Sweden anymore, though punsch still is. But they don’t make punsch essence, just arrak. Bewildering, I know. Anyway, arraksbollar are essentially the same filling/dough/whatever you want to call it as punschrulle but shaped as a ball, covered in dark chocolate and rolled in chocolate sprinkles.
Axel made another batch of the cocoa almond paste scone and topped it with a punsch ganache and chocolate sprinkles and holy guacamole! It was so good.
“Perfect” I said “this recipe is HAVE!”
Fast forward a couple weeks. I have posted the menu of the week, opened the order form, orders are rolling in and I am typing up the recipes in our ordering spreadsheet so I know how much to make of everything. Suddenly I pause. The scone has almond paste in it. The scone has almond paste in it because we were trying to capture the flavor of a punschrulle, which is covered in marzipan. Arraksbollar aren’t coated in marzipan. Is there ever any almond in an arraksboll? A quick google search tells us no. No one puts almonds in their arraksboll.
So why does this scone have almond paste in it and why is it called an arraksboll scone?
Well it has the almond paste because it’s tasty and it’s called an arraksboll scone because that sounded better then calling it a chocolate scone with flavors of punsch and almond. Or chocolate almond paste scone with punsch ganache and sprinkles. Or chocolate, almond punsch sprinkle coated scone.
If you’re Swedish you’re probably thinking the name is silly and inaccurate. If you’re not Swedish you’re probably thinking who cares about the name? That scone sounds great!
Maybe it’s not the most accurate name but the scone itself is delicious, rich with chocolate, pockets of soft almond paste and crunchy with sprinkles. And isn’t that the most important thing of all?
Xoxo,
Cecilia
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